I'm the environment editor at Forbes. Before joining Forbes in April 2011, I wrote about all things green and tech as a contributor to The New York Times, a senior editor at Fortune and an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine. I previously was the business editor at the San Jose Mercury News and during the (first) dot-com era served as a senior writer and senior editor at The Industry Standard (RIP).

Ocean Robot Completes Record-Setting 10,000 Mile Journey

The Mars rover Curiosity may be the most famous robot on – or off – the planet but an ocean-going bot named Papa Mau just set a world’s record for robot-kind by traveling more than 10,000 miles from San Francisco to Australia powered only by waves and sunlight.

Liquid Robotics, the Silicon Valley startup that makes the surfboard-sized robot called a Wave Glider, announced Wednesday that Papa Mau arrived off the coast of Queensland, Australia, on Nov. 20 after surviving storms, sharks and 25-foot surf while its solar-powered sensor arrays collected terabytes of data on ocean and atmospheric conditions during the year-long journey.

“The vehicle actually surprised me by the condition it was in when we pulled it out,” Graham Hine, Liquid Robotics’ senior vice president of product management, told me Wednesday. “The paint was scuffed and there was some wear on the bushings but other than that and a few critters attached here and there it could have kept going.”

“We haven’t pushed the absolute endurance of these vehicles even with this ocean crossing,” he added, noting that barnacles, a crab and a spiny worm had hitched a ride on Papa Mau. “We would like to go further.”

As I wrote last year in a feature story on Liquid Robotics, the company has deployed Wave Gliders around the world where they are undertaking missions for climate scientists, oil companies and the U.S. military:

Packed in their 7-by-2-foot titanium-framed fiberglass bodies are terabytes of cellphone flash storage, a dual-core ARM processor running open Linux software, a battery pack, sensor arrays, a GPS unit, and wireless and satellite communications systems. It’s all powered by two off-the-shelf solar panels that cover the top of the Glider.

But it is what’s unseen 23 feet below the ocean’s surface that makes the Wave Glider a perpetual motion green machine and that its investors are gambling will mint money from oil companies, scientists and the military. Tethered to the floating vehicle are six three and-a-half-foot “fins” attached to a rudder. As the fins tap the energy generated by the up-and-down motion of ocean waves, they move to propel the robot at speeds of up to 2 knots. No fuel—fossil or otherwise—required.

The Wave Glider’s capacity to operate autonomously at sea for months on end gathering data from uncharted reaches of the ocean has attracted $40 million in funding, including $22 million from VantagePoint Capital Partners, a leading Silicon Valley green tech investor, and oil industry services behemoth Schlumberger.

PacX, as Liquid Robotics calls the Pacific Ocean crossing, was conceived to demonstrate the Wave Gliders’ endurance while collecting data for scientists.

Four Wave Gliders departed San Francisco on Nov. 17, 2011, for Hawaii where Papa Mau and a companion robot, Benjamin, headed to Australia while two others, Piccard Maru and Fontaine Maru, set off for Japan.

Benjamin currently is passing the island nation of New Caledonia about 750 miles east of Australia and is expected to complete its journey early next year.

The Japan-bound robots weren’t so lucky. Both experienced rudder problems that left them adrift. Hine says a ship has picked up Fontaine Maru and is bringing it back to the Liquid Robotics R&D facility in Hawaii.

“We want to see if we can modify it and restart its voyage to Japan,” he says. “We don’t know if there was something about the Japan crossing that caused the failure of if it was something with the units themselves.

Papa Mau faced its own challenges, including long stretches of cloudy days that made it difficult for its two solar panels to collect enough energy to power its sensor arrays. But the robot sailed through equatorial waters without a hitch despite fears that strong currents and a lack of waves would take Papa Mau off course.

Liquid Robotics customers can either buy the $100,000 robots or just the data they collect for an annual subscription that’s a fraction of the cost of dispatching a deep ocean ship and crew to do the same job.

Hine says he hopes Papa Mau’s record-setting journey for an autonomous vehicle will be a persuasive sales pitch to potential clients.

“This has been a technology where people haven’t believed it could do what we say it could,” says Hine. “So for this little robot to survive for thousands of miles for a year is a tremendous credibility jump for us.”

As part of the mission supported by Richard Branson’s Virgin Oceanic and Google Earth, Liquid Robotics sponsored the PacX Challenge, which will award $50,000 grant from BP – one of the company’s clients – and six months of Wave Glider services to the scientist that comes up with the best research proposal based on the data collected during the Pacific crossing.

On Wednesday, Liquid Robotics said that it had selected five finalists for the grand prize: J. Michael Beman of the University of California Merced, Nicole Goebel of University of California Santa Cruz, Andrew Lucas, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Tracy Villareal of the University of Texas and oceanographer Elise Ralph of the Boston software company Wise Eddy.

So what’s next for Papa Mau?

Hine says his colleagues are considering an even bigger challenge for the robot. “We may end up putting it in a museum but I would like to see it retasked and sent off for another journey, such as circumnavigating Antarctica or heading from the South Poll to the North Poll and making it through Northwest Passage.”

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